241–250 of 632 posts
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No remotely modern reactor has melted down. Just as you wouldn't factor Amelia Earhart's plane into 2022 air safety prognoses, you shouldn't use Chernobyl reactors for nuclear safety.
What are the biggest safety improvements that have become mainstream since Chernobyl?
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I’m hoping all these comments on HN I see that follow the pattern "I was wrong about something important, but rather than admit that, I'm going to believe that the truth is unknowable" are just the first step on someone's journey to accept an unpleasant shock to their ego. It's depressing to think there's a growing army of geeks who have given up on science, rationality and objective reality just because they got suc…
I don't see why it shouldn't be a reason for being hopeful? Admitting ignorance is generally a step in the right direction. No reason to be depressed about it.
But literally every reactor ever built depended more on government extraction and concentration of capital (i.e., politics) than on market forces, making it all even less predictable.
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By population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade. (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shoul…
1.6GW is a pretty standard install in nuclear. For scale the largest nuclear install Kori is the current largest in operation at 7.4GWe installed capacity[2]. It achieved 74+% capacity last year which is an important point missed when looking at energy _delivered_ to the grid. By contrast US plants achieve much higher capacity factors, with Diablo Canyon in California producing 2.2 GWe at a _lifetime_ operation capac…
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By population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade. (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shoul…
1.6GW is a pretty standard install in nuclear. For scale the largest nuclear install Kori is the current largest in operation at 7.4GWe installed capacity[2]. It achieved 74+% capacity last year which is an important point missed when looking at energy _delivered_ to the grid. By contrast US plants achieve much higher capacity factors, with Diablo Canyon in California producing 2.2 GWe at a _lifetime_ operation capac…
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> The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures. That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too. Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this could be correct. I do find your other points more convincing, though with some "citation needed" wrt. coal.
I can't speak to the meltdown statistic, but for coal: just the burning alone is responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually[1]. And that's before we consider the environmental and health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused) heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a decade ago, and was an ash pond[3]. Edit: I c…
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What's depressing is that you'd need ten of these giant power plants to power Bitcoin mining. And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
You'll need three times more to power all the standby devices in the US, and nobody is doing something as simple as to powering down their tv/console when they stop using it. People don't even unplug their chargers after their phone is charged.
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Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.) In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that disc…
Sounds like we could solve this problem for for nuclear the same way we look to solve problems for renewables: storage.
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I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial) renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...
There's no reason to assume that building the same nuclear reactor design multiple time will maintain the same cost or decrease. Even with the supposedly successful French nuclear program, costs increased over time, there was negative learning: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... There's huge huge risk in choosing a particular design and building even one of it, because we don't know if it…
1970s nuclear safety standards, despite it all, were still better than the energy strategy the world adopted from 1970-2020. Killing off nuclear in search of a perfect power system was a stupid strategy, and failed. The only unfortunate point of karmic justice is that Europe ended up reliant on Russian gas and in an energy crisis as a reward for their stubbornness against making the technically obvious choice.
Well done Finland for even managing to get a reactor built in the face of all that.
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Sure, but let's build 150% of total needed capacity as renewables, and burn coal for the 5 days a year we still need to.
When you do the 2-3x (minimum) for wind and solar + keep the coal plant around and ready to go at a moments notice, including stockpile fuel and maintain it, it starts getting really expensive really fast.
Political, because it should already be banned.
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No remotely modern reactor has melted down. Just as you wouldn't factor Amelia Earhart's plane into 2022 air safety prognoses, you shouldn't use Chernobyl reactors for nuclear safety.
What are the biggest safety improvements that have become mainstream since Chernobyl?